Topics

Featured in Development

Understandability is the concept that a system should be presented so that an engineer can easily comprehend it. The more understandable a system is, the easier it will be for engineers to change it in a predictable and safe manner. A system is understandable if it meets the following criteria: complete, concise, clear, and organized.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Sonali Sharma and Shriya Arora describe how Netflix solved a complex join of two high-volume event streams using Flink. They also talk about managing out of order events and processing late arriving data, exploring keyed state for maintaining large state, fault tolerance of a stateful application, strategies for failure recovery, data validation batch vs streaming, and more.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Tim Cochran presents research gathered from ThoughtWorks' varied clients and projects, and shows some of the metrics their teams have identified as guides to creating the platform and the culture for high performing teams.

Microsoft Updates Azure Dedicated Hosts with Reservations, Maintenance Control and More

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced new updates to its Dedicated Host service in Azure. The public cloud vendor made several updates to the service, such as cost-saving reservations, maintenance control, further options with SKUs, and Resource Health alerts.

Azure Dedicated Host service provides a single-tenant physical server to allow customers to host their Azure virtual machines for Windows and Linux without sharing the capacity with others. Moreover, customers can choose their server type, including CPU, RAM or others for an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) and deploy it on a dedicated host. Microsoft launched the Dedicated Hosts in preview last year in August and made the service generally available at the end of the year.

The reservation discount is applied automatically to the number of running dedicated hosts that match the reservation scope and attributes. You don't need to assign a reservation to a specifically dedicated host to get the discounts.

Furthermore, the updates include maintenance control for Dedicated Hosts giving customers more control over platform maintenance operations with highly sensitive workloads – which means that customers can manage platform updates that don't require a reboot. The maintenance control feature also allows batch updates, combining updates into one update package with the option to delay and apply those updates within a 35-day rolling window.

Another update involves the addition of Resource Health alerts. These alerts can notify customers in "near real-time" when their dedicated hosts experience a change concerning their health status. Azure System administrators can create these Resource Health alerts using an Azure Resource Manager Template. Furthermore, they can create an action group and specify the steps to take once an alert is triggered.

Other leading cloud vendors like Amazon and Google also offer similar services. Amazon, for instance, offers EC2 Dedicated Hosts, which enables customers to bring their software running under existing licenses from vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle to the AWS ecosystem. Google provides sole-tenants nodes on Google Compute Engine, providing dedicated purposes. Both Amazon and Google also offer discounts on these services.

Lastly, since the preview of Dedicated Hosts, Microsoft added support for various VM series and host types. Currently, there is support for both Intel and AMD SKUs with a variety of VM series: Dsv3, Esv3, Dasv4, Easv4, Fsv2, Lsv2, and Msv. Moreover, on the pricing page for Dedicated Hosts, customers can find the complete list of Dedicated Hosts SKUs, their CPU information, and various pricing options, including Azure reservations discounts.